At one point during the week I asked an old political friend whether or not they intended to join the fray on a particular issue. My mate replied quickly and succinctly: the fray is the problem.
This observation is bang on, and fraying is the right concept. Fraying is the unravelling that occurs through constant abrading. That’s where we are. Australian politics has reverted to friction; to manufactured conflict. Conflict is the core of Peter Dutton’s strategy to blast himself into contention. The Liberal leader is like a bouncer on a bender, and the great unravelling of Anthony Albanese is what he seeks.
It’s all brute force. Politics is supposed to be a battle of ideas, but Dutton has styled himself as a one-man insurgency against them. The Liberal party’s catchphrase in the referendum (“if you don’t know, vote no”) is a prompt to disengage your brain; it’s permission to tune out and make decisions on the vibe of the thing. Having determined that constant contention would be the vibe of the voice referendum, Dutton vastly increased the chances that voters will do as he suggests and tune out from the percussive negativity.
Dutton’s adventures in rile and rage are amplified increasingly by the Murdoch empire – less news service, more overweening corporate id. The papers and television pundits anticipate the vexations of their audience, and dish up hot fresh ranting and resentment with degustation banquet efficiency.
While Dutton fires off his shots, the government is drifting like a slow-moving dirigible with a target painted on its side.
Albanese’s relentless positivity about the voice is fixed; a rictus with an expiry date of 14 October. The prime minister can’t eject from a vicious and depressing campaign to lower the cultural temperature. He can’t join Dutton on the low road, and duke it out, because active rebuttal only accelerates a societal fraying volatile enough to persist long after this referendum is settled.
The prime minister can only keep moving forward, and Albanese’s relentless positivity is absolutely sincere and absolutely necessary, given the tone of the voice debate is now little better than an open sewer flushing feelings that haven’t been shared in polite society for several decades.
Positivity and decency are exactly what this moment requires; the only salve to human anguish. But staying positive can sound passive in an ecosystem of relentless, aggressive, polarising politics; a barren landscape where empathy is rendered naive.
I mentioned drift. The Albanese government is drifting between act one and act two, with the referendum the bridge between. Act one involved legislating election promises. Act two will require hard propulsion out of a possible referendum defeat into a fresh election cycle. What act two looks like remains a mystery; it can’t speak its name, or break cover, until the referendum question is resolved.
Amplifying this sense of drift has been a flurry of own goals. The recent fracas about whether or not to grant additional flights to Qatar Airways made the government look tone deaf, vaguely shifty and completely disorganised on a water cooler subject (“how bad is Qantas?”). This week, the government unveiled a new inquiry into Covid-19 which excluded unilateral actions taken by the states from its scope.
It’s possible the government excluded the states because of a pragmatic judgment: we don’t control that theatre, so why go there? But there were two obvious problems with the carve-out. The first was substantive. Pandemics kill people, the Covid-19 pandemic certainly won’t be the last one, so there is a prima facie case to kick the tyres of Australia’s response right across the federation. If you are having an inquiry, best make it meaningful. The second was political. The carve-out was easily weaponised as Albanese protecting Daniel Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk – a couple of battle-scarred premiers completing their last laps around the oval.
Overlying the run of questionable judgments is the growing fractiousness in the parliament. The government got cut up during the last sitting fortnight in various Senate votes because key people made poor assessments about the likely direction of travel. Some ministers have sought to build good working relationships with the crossbench while others seem to regard relationships as somebody else’s problem to manage. Those chickens are coming home to roost.
I understand the constant backroom bartering with the crossbench must irritate a government that is running at full capacity, and actually wants to get things done. But the government seems to be losing an important bit of perspective. The current parliament is one of its best assets. There is a progressive majority in both chambers. If the red hats are advancing, that majority provides opportunity to keep moving forward.
When it comes to the progressive forces, there can be no perfect union, obviously. The Greens will keep wanting the government to go harder and faster with climate policy than Labor believes it can do in the absence of a demonstrable social licence for the transition. The Greens will keep trying to recruit Labor voters. The teals, speaking to a different constituency, will advance ideas that Labor can’t accommodate. But the Albanese government needs that teal buffer to remain in place and keep the Liberals out of majority government.
Perhaps I could suggest two ways to restore a bit of comity and collaboration in the progressive camp; ideas that have the benefit of being good policy.
The first would involve the government pursuing some decent reforms increasing transparency. In the age of a federal integrity commission, ministers should publish diaries disclosing meetings with third parties. The government should also be as transparent as possible about taxpayer-funded special purpose flights instead of the nonsense that’s going on now. And there should be an overhaul of the processes for lobbyists gaining passes to the parliamentary precinct.
The second opportunity involves ensuring that any overhaul of the rules around political donations and disclosure is inclusive. We expect to see a government proposal on that before the end of the year. There will be a temptation to entrench an incumbency advantage for the major parties at the expense of the disruptors. I strongly suspect that temptation is best avoided.
When Albanese won the election last May, he sensed an opportunity for Labor to consolidate its electoral position. Support for major parties has been in structural decline, but the new prime minister believed it was possible to buck that trend if the incoming government demonstrated it was not a pack of dickheads. Albanese’s objective was to deliver promises, and dial down the conflict. Be inclusive, be positive, be purposeful, and establish Labor (as he put it to me during interviews shortly after the victory) as “the natural party of government”.
But the weather has changed. The government has hit major headwinds as Australians have sunk deeper into financial stress. This is a difficult time to be an incumbent government. The national mood has darkened, and the referendum has sanctioned rancorous polarisation, providing real-time rehearsal space for grifters who seek to import the orchestrated dysfunction of political discourse in the US and the United Kingdom to our shores.
Given that, what seemed possible a year ago feels less possible now.
But it’s unclear to me whether the prime minister’s mindset is shifting as fast as the zeitgeist. It’s also unclear to me whether or not he has the structures in place to force a corrective in the event things were not just drifting through a scheduled interregnum, but actually running off the rails.
Albanese prides himself on being the chief political strategist of the government; he’s worked on it, but he possesses that lone wolf tendency.
He trusts his instincts, and his experience, because he’s very often right.
But nobody is right all the time, particularly when they have a job that consumes all of their waking hours; when they can’t diarise time to plot and muse in their own head. And it’s unclear to me which of Albanese’s confidantes and colleagues would intervene if they sensed things were adrift.
The problem is not people being afraid to speak up – a lack of constructive truth telling was a significant problem in the Rudd government, one that ultimately triggered a crisis that destroyed it. That’s not the problem here.
The main issue I observe is that people are head down, bums up in their portfolios. Albanese gives his ministry space to be ministers, which means people are actually running portfolios. They aren’t sitting around waiting for the prime minister to dictate the play.
Given that, I’m not sure who is maintaining enough reserve to be able to assess the whole landscape in dispassionate fashion, and who would have the authority to press the prime minister to chart a different course.
